Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 137

MR BOOK REVIEWS
WHY WE LOST: A General’s Inside Account of the
Iraq and Afghanistan Wars
Daniel P. Bolger, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing, New York, 2014, 544 pages

L

t. Gen. (retired) Daniel Bolger opens his book
by writing, “I am a United States Army general, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism.”
As intended, the statement grabs the reader’s
attention, but the focus of the work is not how
one general lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan;
rather, his underlying theme is that the U.S. military
forgot its Sun Tzu in that it did not know the enemy
or itself. This dual failure resulted in a series of
unrealistic goals that led the United States to snatch
defeat from the jaws of victory–or at least from the
jaws of good enough. The blame Bolger places on
himself and his fellow general officers is that their
“lack of humility” prevented them from challenging
the underlying assumptions that drove U.S. policy
and from challenging their belief that they could
transform Iraq and Afghanistan.
Undoubtedly, the strongest part of Bolger’s
argument is that the United States did not understand its enemies in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The
historical context for this discussion is set with a
review of Desert Storm, the USS Cole, and 9/11 attacks, and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The driving force behind this analysis is to answer
the question, “Who was the enemy?” Bolger contends the failure of policy makers to answer that
basic question placed the United States on the longwar road with available options decreasing with
every passing year. Furthermore, because senior U.S.
leaders did not know who the enemy was, they also
did not fully understand the nuances of tribal warfare. In particular, they failed to grasp the importance of patience and the ability of tribal warriors to
bide their time.
The second part of Bolger’s argument deals with
how the United States saw itself. He contends the
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2015

U.S. military never reconciled itself to the idea it
was a force designed for short, decisive, conventional conflicts and not long, drawn-out counterinsurgency operations. The inability to resolve the
conflict of executing a counterinsurgency-centric
strategy with a conventional military against a guerrilla force is where Bolger believes general officers
came up short. Specifically, the general officer corps’
failed in the execution of operational art and the development of realistic military goals. Consequently,
the U.S. military spent more than a decade attempting to accomplish the unrealistic task of creating
pro-U.S. democracies in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The primary drawback with Bolger’s argument is
that he leaves the reader wanting more details as to
what exactly was transpiring at the general officer
level. As hinted in the subtitle, A General’s Inside
Account of The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the reader
expects to get more insight on the closed-door debates that must have occurred at that level. Details
into the conversations Bolger had with his fellow
general officers, especially in terms of their views
and assessments, would make a valuable addition
to this book. This is especially so since one of the
author’s key assertions is that the failure to align
operational-level goals with success at the tactical level led the United States to stay in Iraq and
Afghanistan much too long.
For those interested in the ongoing discussion of
what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and how the
military should think about future wars, this work is
recommended as an addition to their reading lists.
In particular, it makes a constructive contribution to
the debate on what role counterinsurgency will have
in future Army doctrine by questioning the value of
winning “hearts and minds” against the effectiveness
of counterguerilla operations. Additionally, Bolger
does an excellent job capturing multiple stories of
heroism and leadership at the tactical level to help
tell the story of the military’s last 13 years of war.
Lt. Col. Wm. Kenna McCurry, U.S. Army,
Retired, Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
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